Jack Mollard’s last words to his wife Mary Jean were, “You look so beautiful and I love you.”

She died at home within the hour, a fresh salon hairdo from the day before. The last thing she told her children was, “Tell Jack I’m so glad he asked me to marry him.”

That was March 4.

Six months later, on Sept. 13, Jack passed away in their dining room-turned-bedroom, set up to save the elderly couple from having to climb stairs. He was 93; she was 88.

His death came five days before his 65th wedding anniversary, and three days after seeing his beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders lose at the Banjo Bowl.

“The Bombers won and I think that had a real impact on dad,” Patrick Mollard said, admittedly “a little bit tongue in cheek.”

That Sunday was the beginning of his decline in earnest, although Jack himself admitted two years ago that his slide begin at 91, “and then it got steeper and steeper.” At the time, he was still making daily trips to the office.

Raised on a farm near Watrous, Jack was a lifelong Saskatchewanian outside of his years away for graduate school, receiving his master’s at Purdue and his PhD at Cornell.

It was at the latter school that he met Mary Jean Lynn, a beauty from West Virginia with what Jack called “coal-black eyes.”

As an engineer and geologist, he should know.

Jack Mollard and his wife Mary Jean Mollard were married in 1952. She died in March 2017 and he died last week.Don Healy /
Regina Leader-Post

A winner of many accolades, he consulted on projects on all seven continents. He did 180 groundwater studies, most in Saskatchewan. He mapped the first roads and transmission lines in the province’s north. He authored three textbooks and mapped three new national parks.

More than an accomplished professional, though, his children — daughters Kate Vasicek (also known as Cathy) and Jacci Mollard (rarely known as Jacqueline) and son Patrick — remember an engaged father, a compassionate listener, a good friend and an adoring husband.

A lifelong learner, Jack hated to be idle. On one rare occasion sick in bed, he did not neglect to learn a new skill: magic tricks. Years thereafter, he entertained his children, then three grandchildren — Nicole, Danielle and Ashton — with his sleight of hand.

Jack’s interests ran the gamut, learning all there was to know about birdsongs, trees, leaves, clouds, constellations, religion — “and then he got really hooked on Mars,” said Patrick. He even helped map the planet in the 1990s using his decades of experience mapping the Arctic.

“He couldn’t bear to not be doing anything and not be learning anything,” said Jacci.

On road trips, like their annual trip to Billings, Mont., Jack and Mary Jean travelled with a dictionary in the glove box.

Their home was full of books, and the living room had no TV in sight.

“They called it the idiot box,” said Jacci.

Jack valued family, work and community. He was involved in his church and was a Rotary Club member for almost 62 years.

Each year hosting their friends and neighbours for a Christmas party, the contents of Mary Jean’s punch bowl were “quite lethal,” said Patrick.

“Toxic,” Jacci agreed — a bottle of gin, a bottle of white wine, and some pink lemonade for colour.

A good listener who only offered advice when it was requested, Jacci recalled something her father once told her: “I never want to be a person who has to cross the street when they see somebody coming.”

With their children grown and gone — Patrick and Kate following in his engineer footsteps — Jack and Mary Jean found other company.

On weekends, said Patrick, “When (neighbour) Jan couldn’t find her daughters, she would come over to mom and dad’s place and they would be in the living room … talking to a three- and five-year-old.”

Jack and Mary Jean would each write a letter, weekly, to their children — hers typed, and his “in that very unique and hard-to-read handwriting,” said daughter-in-law Leslie Mollard.

“It was like chicken scratch,” Jacci added.

Jack didn’t believe in lending money, but giving it freely to someone in need.

While Jack did well in his career, and contributed $107,000 in scholarship funding to University of Regina students over the years, he never boasted any wealth and never wanted more than he had.

Mary Jean had always dreamed of a white Cadillac, but Jack denied the dream.

“I don’t really feel comfortable about buying a white Cadillac,” Patrick remembered his father explaining. “No one else in the neighbourhood has a white Cadillac and I don’t want to be the only guy with a white Cadillac.”

He drove a Honda Civic for the last 15 years of his life.

After Lynden Penner bought J.D. Mollard and Associates in 2010, Jack continued to work and made regular trips to the office until he was 92.

Previously, in his own words, he’d “never missed a day in the office,” even through cancer treatments.

Only in April, said Kate, did the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan (APEGS) give Jack his life membership, which is available to retired engineers over age 65.

“He said he never worked at a job where he felt like it was work,” said Patrick, whether it was from his childhood job checking hats at Danceland to his decades of work at the firm he’d founded in 1956.

“It’s kind of a little surreal because he’s the kind of guy you just sort of think is always going to be there,” said Penner, president of J.D. Mollard and Associates.

“We still have his office fully set up … His stereoscope is there, which is kind of tattered and beaten after decades of use, and he kept a big thick book of contacts, with business cards and phone numbers and kept adding to it.”

As a mentor and colleague, Jack was always positive and upbeat, even through a challenge.

“He’d bound into the office in the morning and was excited about the day,” said Penner. “Often he would say ‘it’s going to be a big day,’ and had all these things on his list.”

Jack’s children are grateful to Bayshore HealthCare for helping their parents live in their home to the end.

“Both of them would say, ‘I want to leave this house feet first,’ so they did,” said Kate.

Jack loved the company’s caregivers, who come from countries around the world.

“Dad was so interested in their background and how they grew up and he had this boyish or childlike wonder about other people’s upbringings and their cultures,” said Patrick.

To celebrate their parents and send off the Lakeview house, which will soon be on the market, the Mollard children are hosting one last punch party for friends and neighbours on Saturday.

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